Steve Urbon: Rash of fires rattles nerves in the city

Monday

Jul 21, 2014 at 12:01 AM

A rash of early morning fires has not surprisingly put fire officials on alert in the near North End of New Bedford. The most recent (as of this writing) was a blaze on a blank exterior wall of the Roasted Pig restaurant at 98 Nash Road on Friday.

A rash of early morning fires has not surprisingly put fire officials on alert in the near North End of New Bedford. The most recent (as of this writing) was a blaze on a blank exterior wall of the Roasted Pig restaurant at 98 Nash Road on Friday.

"I went home at around 10:30," owner Fernando Godinho said, "and at 1:30 the phone rang. They were telling me: Fire! Fire! It was the police."

Luckily for him, the fire, with no obvious source of ignition, spread up the corner of the building to the eaves, burning through the vinyl siding and wooden sheathing underneath, but making no progress into the building, which didn't have to close.

What slowed the fire was the fact that behind the sheathing, the building is actually made of cinder blocks. The whole idea was to disguise them to look like clapboards.

The incident was over in a matter of minutes, but it's got Godinho on edge. "I think it's someone in the neighborhood," he said.

A week earlier, as District Fire Chief Robert Frates told me, Breault Roofing, just one block away from the Roasted Pig, was the scene of a similarly suspicious fire that caused $45,000 in damage.

A stack of rigid foam roof insulation being stored just inside the chain link fence was on fire, again in the wee hours of the morning.

The blaze destroyed the insulation, worth about $3,000, and spread to two new industrial roof air conditioning units worth $20,000 apiece, rendering them scrap. "They had never been used," co-owner Jimmy Breault lamented. And he's not certain that the firm's insurance will cover the loss.

There does seem to be something of a pattern here, because a day later, fire struck the New Bedford Tire Recycling operation on Acushnet Avenue next to the Route 18 pedestrian overpass.

Owner Carlos Aguiar said that the fire consumed three trailer loads of used tires worth $3,000, which insurance won't cover.

But this time, there's a video. Aguiar said that fire investigators have taken with them the video recorded by a security camera, which shows a person in the shadows approach the trailers and start a small fire.

"In four or five minutes, you see the flame and it looked like an explosion, which spread the fire," he said.

Aguiar said that his impression was that the person had thrown an accelerant into the fire, because otherwise, it is very hard to start a tire fire. "You need a constant heat source, like a blowtorch," he said.

Fire officials took the video and are attempting to enhance it to see whether the perpetrator's face can be discerned, and whether there was more than one person there that night, he said.

It's been a bad month so far for fires, even if most of them have been doused within a short while.

And while there is nothing but speculation, it is not lost on Aguiar that the fire was at the base of the pedestrian overpass that leads to Purchase Street only a block from the Lebanese Kitchen, which burned at the beginning of last week.

Chief Frates made it clear without using the word "arson" that the department is on higher alert right now. The public should be, too.

This might not be a bad time for business owners to make sure that security cameras, if they have them, are operating correctly.

We have been awfully lucky that no one has been injured in these four fires. Perhaps if enough people keep their eyes open there won't be a fifth any time soon.

Steve Urbon's column appears in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at 508-979-4448 or surbon@s-t.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveUrbonSCT.